THE FEAR OF URBAN DESIGN INTEGRATION.

Most youths today are brought up to be “educated” and in receiving this privilege enter into apartheid futures. Doomed as individuals into black boxes leads into further small roles of blinkered interests. Through “higher education” and then reality business they still find themselves spinning on predetermined sociocultural pathways.

In this 21st century, separation starts and continues in family residential shelters for a period of time in urban and city environs. Seated in mobile separation is further enhanced by robotic land, rail, ocean and aircraft vehicles. These heavyweights moving about to all destinations hide passengers behind dark glasses and health damaging exhaust emissions. These circumstances are sliding humanity into a quicksand. Slowly but surely sucking individuals into a controlled cultural milieu as doomed conformists. The accompaniment of a never-ending control of harsh reality separation persists through entire individual lives. Which citizen remembers daily the kind built relationships of a self-sufficient rural community?

Functioning together as adults means the future of singular performance with “Like” people working for instead of with groups, conducting specified tasks, in professional business, commerce, industry, and government, ecumenical and recreational acts striving for something of undetermined value.

City life oversight of creation, lawmaking, maintenance, and operation is controlled from the “top down” forces of government. New International (UN, ASEAN, NEPAD, ADB etcetera.) and Regional (CALIFORNIA = COASTAL COMMISSION and ASSOCIATION OF GOVERNMENTS and NPO’s) oversight entities of authority have assumed roles to integrate government affairs in states and sovereign nations.

Urban planning and design are plagued by, the modern fear of missing out. (F.O.M.O.) However, the fear of urban planning and design in the process of decision-making is the greatest problem for the future of humanity. Moral anxieties highlighted in this 21st-century era is between the individual coming to terms of understanding with either utopia (ideal and perfect state) or dystopia (vision of very bad place).

Inattention to city planning, design, and cooperative citizen decision-making is a symptom of an unsettled manner of thinking. The existing process disregards the most important mental faculty – the exercise of reason and logic. Attention to urban civil matters has become more than a proposition for self-enlightened ambitions of the powerful few. Masked by the continued attention of a minority of “superior intellects” requires undaunted effort and skill of experts only found in Corporate Academic Politics and Bureaucracy. (C.A.P.)

Attention by all humanity to city growth and change is integral to developing citizen’s individual conscience for community affairs. However, the distractions of the modern world have and will literally damage individual brains. Human relationship to the world online has devised a way of influencing citizens to become virtual addicts as shut-ins to screens displaying an overwhelming barrage of unreality. An epidemic erosion of attention is a sure sign of an impending dark age.

There are many urban planning and design warnings to fear. They come with a variety of names. People acting as spoilers, hackers, red-lighters, local and world improvers, gatekeepers, bureaucrats, politicians, and candidates for public office are a mash-up of disparate leadership concerns. These well-meaning society members should all come with warning labels. When will citizens have a chance to see, analyze, engage and understand community decision-making for building cities? When will citizens choices of prognosis carefully decide if they still want to take part in any further controls from Corporate, Academic and Politbureau? (C.A.P.)

Urban design is an invitation to surprises. If citizen-leadership becomes a daily participation into reality none can see into the future and predict accurately what will happen. Maybe a group of minority community citizens can do better. To quote Jane Jacobs – “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

An urban design future is the priority subject of future city building. It might be unpredictable and full of unintended process sequences and mistake consequences. Nevertheless, urban designers know a thing or two! First, tomorrow deeply affects today. Second, shifts probably will not be swift or that different after all. The art of urban design anticipates what might happen and adjusts for intelligent future planning.

Urban planning and design cannot stand in its shadow anymore. It must eschew activism. There should be no more designers at the bottom of consideration for city development. C.A.P. together with the tacit support of economists, bankers, financiers, scientists, and environmentalists control future settlements. All have concepts of some validity as to how the world might work. None has a superior position. Therefore, all should act humbly as team members with positive input for the betterment of the whole in city evolution. The citizens of Earth can no longer disregard urban design for interdisciplinary integration.

Connecting the dots of interdisciplinary pertinent domain knowledge interests toward a holistic future confronts integration matters because that is what has been done unknowingly in the past. Defining and arranging the essence of urban design is defined by Nature in molecule, space, distance, motion, and energy function relationships in between. Individual thoughts revealed in urban agenda analysis, prognosis and synthesis must also be comprehended. The placement of layers to merge together the dots of intersects for a substantive array of facts for community decision-making is the task. If evaluated with grades, problem resolution can be positively attained for some if not all of the policy issue concerns of the decision-making moment.

Decision-making choices must make moves into the real laboratory of urban risk taking with an evaluation grade for sustainability, reliance, durability for settlement and environmental harmony. City creation cannot be done in existing apartheid under C.A.P. controls anymore This urban past is clear evidence of life destruction on Earth.

The final value determination for successful village, town and city design implementation is only answered by linking local city, regional and national “Genius Clusters” for participation in assessment, technology risk and evaluation of consequences.